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Context and purpose of the work - This work draws attention to information retrieval philosophies and techniques allied to the records management profession, advocating a wider professional consideration of a functional approach to information management, in this instance in the development of information architectures. Methodology - This paper draws from a hypothesis originally presented by the author (Milne, 2007a) that advocated a viewpoint whereby the application of records management techniques traditionally applied to develop business classification schemes was offered as an additional solution to organising information resources and services (within a university intranet), where earlier approaches notably subject and administrative based arrangements were found to be lacking. The hypothesis was tested via work-based action learning and is presented here as an extended case study. This paper also draws upon evidence submitted to the Joint Information Systems Committee in support of the University of Abertay Dundee's application for consideration of the JISC award for innovation in records and information management (University of Abertay Dundee, 2007). Findings - The original hypothesis has been tested in the workplace. Information retrieval techniques allied to records management (functional classification) were the main influence in the development of pre and post-coordinate information retrieval systems to support a wider information architecture, where the subject approach was found to be lacking. Their use within the workplace has since been extended. Originality/value - The paper advocates the development of information retrieval as a discipline, should include a wider consideration of functional classification, as this alternative to the subject approach is largely ignored in mainstream IR works.

The encyclopaedia of Iranian architectural history was established with the goal of increasing the accessibility of the widespread resources and documents related to Iranian architectural history and to provide a better and more productive space for collaboration of researchers and scholars, enabling them to expand and improve this encyclopaedia. The information architecture which started to get implemented is aimed to achieve three goals. First, increase the accessibility of the documents related to topics; second, the relation between concepts; third, the relation between concepts and documents. A three-layer architecture is designed to achieve the mentioned goals (EIAH cake). The underlying layer is a pool of information which is an integration of distributed digital repositories in our case. The top level is the knowledge representation level, an ontology of Iranian architectural history and the last layer which sits in the heart of this architecture is the mediator level which is responsible for establishing the relation between concepts and documents and enhancing search and semantic interoperability. The metadata model for describing resources in distributed digital repositories is customized based on Dublin Core with refinements. All documents in distributed repositories get their metadata according to this model and a detector agent (the mediator level) harvest metadata to interpret them by the ontology (the top layer). The results of this process will be presented in a semantic portal or might be used for complex search queries by end users. When this happens on a federation of distributed digital repositories, the ocean of separated documents becomes much meaningful and interpretable by human scholars.